Let’s stop arguing about the state and start arguing about democracy instead

By Jon Wilson and Marc Stears

Arguments about the state just never seem to go away in the Labour Party. When the party was born in the late nineteenth century, some socialists threatened to tear the nascent movement apart if it did not reject the bourgeois democratic state. A few decades later, guild socialists such as G.D.H. Cole tried to convince the party that it needed to be more democratic and local, less authoritarian and centralised. Still later, in the 1960s, the New Left demanded Labour turn away from its almost total occupation with the welfare state and nationalisation.

Now, Tim Horton thinks that these anti-statist arguments have come back. Connecting the work of Philip Collins and Maurice Glasman, Horton sees a New and Blue Labour nexus that seeks once again to demonise the state. With all of their talk of “localism” and the “dispersal” of power, Horton insists, New and Blue Labour have become obsessed with political means and have forgotten to focus on political ends. Just like their redundant predecessors from Labour’s past, an irrational hostility to central government has blinded them to the fact that the state is capable of great good.

If the rhetoric of “redistributing power” that is so popular today really were just a rhetorical blind designed to undermine the achievements of Labour’s past then Horton would be right. But it is not. The Blue Labour debate has not resonated so widely and deeply because it is a cover for a Blairite attack on the welfare state. It has done so because it reminds us that the Labour Party is at its best when its democratic spirit burns at its brightest.

This democratic spirit requires that we find ways of renewing, rather than undermining, the reforming state. This is why a campaign for the redistribution of power is crucial. The public institutions that we all love – the BBC, the NHS, the Universities – would be stronger, not weaker, if the people who use and work within them had a greater ability to shape them on a daily basis. The democratic commitments that lie at the very core of the Labour tradition tell us that public services get better when people organise to improve them, they don’t get worse.

More immediately, the democratic spirit demands that the Labour Party become a living movement before it gains office again. Throughout its history, Labour has offered a home to those who wish to come together collectively to overcome the difficulties that face them and to help each other realize their own goals. At its best, Labour is a party which does not claim to know the answers in advance, but where people organise together to shape their own political destiny. Labour is not the centralising party. That is the Conservatives.

This call for a new democratic spirit is far from just an intellectual movement. It motivates the efforts of Constituency Labour Parties across the country, from Edgbaston to Greenwich to Trafford, who are fighting to revive the tradition of Labour as a local community movement as well as an election-winning machine. It shapes the new endeavours of Movement for Change. And it will define Ed Miliband’s leadership.

The task of giving life to this new democratic spirit in the Labour Party, let alone in the state itself, won’t be an easy one. We live in changed times and unseen difficulties no doubt lie in the party’s path. But one thing is certain: Labour won’t return to the heart of British life if it turns its back on the language of redistributing power.